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July 30, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:52:26
Dave Rubin's Book Revealed | Rubin Report
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dave rubin
01:51:37
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dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Holy cow, it has been a crazy day here at Rubin Report headquarters.
We got a major, major announcement that has sort of been leaking through the internet as the day has gone by, but we got a major announcement coming.
It's just been crazy here.
Everybody on my team has been here doing a thousand different things.
As you guys know, I'm heading off the grid in a couple days for the month of August.
We'll get back to that in just a little bit.
But there is a reason we're doing this livestream out of nowhere, this little impromptu livestream.
We only gave you a warning about two minutes ago.
And the reason for that is that I am beyond thrilled, elated.
crazed with joy, overjoyed, insert endless adjectives of happiness,
to finally today be able to share with you guys, I think I got this going with no glare,
how am I doing guys?
My book, Don't Burn This Book, Free Thinking in an Age of Unreason,
is officially available for pre-sale today.
You can go to DontBurnThisBook.com, and the reason that I am doing this livestream right now
is that every single copy, no matter how many thousands of copies we sell today,
I am going to personally sign a book plate for every single one.
So you will get my signed signature on a sticker, the official Don't Burn This Book sticker,
which you can put in the book, or if you get the ebook,
you can put it on the back of that, or you can put it on your laptop.
You can put it above your bed, you can put it on the side of your car, whatever works.
So every single book, no matter how many we sign, the first thousand that we sell today are numbered.
So one 1,000, two 1,000, 997 1,000.
We've already sold a ton of them.
I don't know how many, but we've been getting just blasted all day long.
We're jumping up on these Amazon little categories.
I'm right behind Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I'm like number three in political autobiographies already and like a whole bunch of other fun stuff.
So anyway, for the purposes of this hour and a half or two hours that we're gonna do here,
I wanna tell you guys a little bit about the book, what the writing process was like and all that stuff.
So, more than anything else, here's what you do.
Go to DontBurnThisBook.com, buy the book however you want to buy it.
You can buy it on Amazon, you can buy it on Barnes & Noble, excuse me.
There's plenty of other places that you can buy it.
Then when you get your receipt, what you're gonna do is you're gonna forward it to DontBurnThisBook at PRH, Penguin Random House, dot com.
Well, don't burn this book.
You can either do at prh.com or at penguinrandomhouse.com.
Forward your receipt there.
It'll obviously have your name on it.
Include your address, and we are going to send you one of these book plates.
You will be the first to have the book, and you will know that you got it on day one.
And I'm thrilled.
I'm just thrilled that we finally—this has been a lot of work, you know, this last year.
Has just been completely, not last year, it seems like the last 10 years, but the last year and a half, two years have just been absolutely crazy between touring with Jordan Peterson where we did 120 some odd stops in 20 something countries and bounced all over the world and that I was able to just be part of the magic around Jordan.
And oh, well speaking of Jordan, Don't burn this book.
How am I doing here with glare?
Forward by Jordan Peterson.
So I want to tell you a little bit of insider stuff and I'll tell you a little bit about the book itself.
Jordan, when we were in Oslo—we were doing a second show in Oslo, and most of the shows sold out in hours, some of them sold out in minutes.
I think the Stockholm show sold out so quickly that they added another show, because it sold out in like three minutes or something.
We were in Oslo, and I got the call from my agent at CAA.
We had been trying to figure out a book deal, and a bunch of people had reached out to us.
And then, some of you guys may remember, about a year ago, There was this Playboy profile on me, which was really good, and then from there basically every publishing house was reaching out and they wanted to figure it out.
And we went back and forth, and then my guys at CAA basically put the book up for auction, which is where all the publishing houses come in.
They just make their best offer.
Anyway, my agent calls me.
He said, we closed the deal.
This is what we're doing.
Beyond overjoyed.
I ran into Jordan's dressing room.
So I'm in a little dressing room on the side.
Jordan's got the nice big dressing room.
And he was in there with his wife Tammy.
Oh, and David, my husband, was with me at the time.
So we walked in there and we were just absolutely thrilled.
And I told Jordan, this is about 10 minutes before the show.
So he's about to speak to 4,000 some odd people.
The shows in Oslo were huge.
And I told him, and he slapped his hands together, and he had this huge, huge smile on his face.
And he kind of spun around in his chair, and he was absolutely just thrilled for me.
And without, before I could even say anything, he said, would you like me to write the foreword for you?
And I was like, how do you even respond to that?
Like, nah-nah.
I'm good, Peterson.
No forward.
That'll be fine.
So yes, the forward will be written by Jordan Peterson.
We've gotten a whole bunch of advance praise.
I don't want to read all this stuff to you because it's on, if you go to DontBurnThisBook.com, you can read some of the advance praise, but we've got advance praise from Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson and Peter Thiel and my friend Larry King.
It's been quite an adventure to get here.
So the book itself, what I want to tell you guys a little bit related to the book, is that it's really been an adventure.
So I'm guessing that most of you haven't written a book and this is my first one.
And as some of you know, for the last couple of years I've been trying to write a book and I would start and stop and I could never sort of, I could tell some stories but it was I was having trouble sort of getting it to a point where it was saying something that was truly authentic, meaningful, that would be worthy of you spending your money on.
And then in the last year, between touring with Jordan, and doing the show, and some of the mob stuff going after me, and front page of the New York Times, and that ridiculous Alt-Right article, and so many things, and just watching all of the things that I've been talking about on this show for years.
They were sort of fringe ideas three years ago, right, when I was talking about, like, what was happening with the left and the false cries of racism and bigotry and all of those things as ways of winning arguments instead of actually winning arguments with facts.
When I was talking about that years ago, it was just starting to bubble up, and I think that that's probably what put me on a lot of your radars.
So if you guys are liberals, or let's say you were lefties, or maybe you're sort of begrudgingly lefties now, it's like, I was starting to say something that now everyone sees as very obvious.
Like, what's happening with the progressives right now, they've really gone off the rails, and they're just dragging the Democrats with them.
Where are the good Democrats?
Where are the classical liberals?
Where are the old school blue dog Democrats?
Where are the JFKs?
I don't know.
I talk about that in this book, and I come up with some prescriptions at the end.
And if you're a conservative, I think what brought you here probably was that you never saw someone that was kind of decent and had some liberal beliefs that treated you like a human.
and didn't think you were a racist, bigot, homophobe.
And just by sharing my feelings about this and then talking to people, not every week,
but often about that sort of set of issues, this is all to the backdrop of the rise of Trump
and everything else, and then how this culture war has just burst forth into everything, right?
Now it's in our political system, it's in our education system,
all of these things around censorship, like everything that we've talked about here
just kept sort of happening.
You know, we, uh...
Brett Weinstein at Evergreen State being booted off campus basically for fighting racism.
Lindsey Shepard at Wilfrid Laurier basically being, you know, reprimanded because she showed a Jordan Peterson video in class.
A guy like James Damore who fought the diversity memo at Google.
Like, all of these people kept walking through this room.
And then there was sort of the rise of the intellectual dark web and the whole crew, whether it's Peterson, and say Ben Shapiro and me probably leaning a little more
right at this point, or at least, let's say, a little more liberty-minded.
And then there's the guys that I think still consider themselves lefties, say the Weinstein
brothers and Sam Harris.
And a whole crew of people that something that we did in this room, which is in my garage—I
mean, I'm in my garage right now—started becoming really, really culturally relevant.
And then, you know, the endless haters and all of that nonsense and the hit pieces from
Vox and from HuffPo and the rest of it, and, you know, trying to get Pete Buttigieg—I
was trying to get Mayor Pete on the show—some of you remember this—about a month and a
half ago, and tweeted at his comms guy, and the guy said, DM me.
And then suddenly, HuffPo journalists and Vox journalists and a guy from Media Matters
all jumped in, you know, called me all sorts of bad names.
And we had already gone back and forth with Buttigieg's team via email about getting
him on the show and then they backed out of that.
And it's just like this war that's happening about who you can talk to and when you can talk to them.
So that is what this book is about, learning to fight the mob.
Free Thinking in an Age of Unreason, that's the subtitle, because we Right now, live in a time of unreason.
Everyone is sort of hysterical all the time and all of those things.
Okay, so let me do a quick reset here, and then what we're gonna do is, as you guys buy the book, I am going to start reading off names.
So you'll hopefully get a shout out here.
I don't know that I can read everybody's name, but my guys are just gonna give me live on the fly.
First names only, so first names only.
Don't worry about that.
We're not outing any of you as crazy right-wingers.
Don't worry about that.
But, quick reset.
Don'tBurnThisBook.com, every single copy that we sell today, I will sign personally.
I have a brand new Sharpie right here.
So you're gonna get a signed book plate, which we've got right here, the official book plate.
I'm gonna sign that and you'll be able to stick it right inside your book or on the back of your book
or wherever you wanna put it, on your car, wherever works.
So what you do is, if you buy the book, you get the email receipt and then forward that
to Don'tBurnThisBook at prhpenguinrandomhouse.com and they'll take care of the rest.
The book, by the way, comes out on April 28th, 2020, which I know seems like a long, long time from now.
And there were several reasons around that and some dates changed and a few things.
There's a lot going on just sort of culturally.
We were trying to figure out timing.
You know, obviously as we roll into 2020, everything is gonna be completely bananas
related to the election.
You know, the election obviously is November 2020.
We wanted to get a little bit ahead of that because basically from like June to November,
it's just gonna be endless Trump book and it's just gonna be awful garbage.
And really, that's not what this is about.
Obviously, I reference Trump and I talk about Trumpism and I talk about all of the things that I talk about in this room.
But I didn't want to write a book really about the election or just another one of these generic books.
So this really is, this is my journey and sort of what I've learned, the lessons that I've learned about standing up to the mob and the rest of it along the way.
So don't burn this book dot com.
And you can buy the book at Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, etc., etc., and then forward your receipt to DontBurnThisBook at PRH.com.
Let me just do a couple shout-outs real quick.
Lillian, I think you are officially the first person to buy the book, because before we had even promoted
anything on Twitter, you started doing a little Googling, and you, I believe, are the first person.
So as far as I'm concerned, you're getting one out of a thousand.
So the first thousand that I sign today are gonna be numbered.
These are just coming in in all crazy order right now.
I see Helen's in the document right now adding people.
So yeah, Lillian, you're getting one out of a thousand.
The first thousand I'm doing numbered signings of.
And then from there, then it's just I'm just going to sign all of them.
But we can't number every single one, no matter how many thousand we sell today.
OK, so just quick shout outs to Joe Paisano, Christopher Warren, Warren Dent, my man who's been with me from the beginning, who hooked us up.
With the sound panels in our studio.
Thanks, brother.
Mike, Robert, Michael, Carrie, Laura, James, Jacob, David, Larry, Gary, Kristen, Tristan, Mika, Jeff, Kyle, Shauna, Emma and Raymond.
I'll stop right there for a little bit.
And so let me just tell you.
A little bit.
I don't want to give it all away, and we're still editing right now.
So the manuscript, I sent it in a couple weeks ago, and we are still editing it right now.
And as you guys know, I'm also going off the grid in two days on Thursday.
I am completely shutting it down.
No computer, no phone, no email, no news, no nothing.
I am disappearing.
I have actually some family here right now.
And I am disappearing.
I am detoxing from all of this.
This is sort of the perfect culmination of what this last year has been.
I've done this August off the grid thing for the last couple of years.
And I hope some of you will join me in doing it in whatever way you can, whether it's just weekends or just not doing social media a little bit or whatever.
But we're not taking the month off.
So we doubled up shows this month in July.
So we've got four great shows coming for you in August.
So there will be new shows in August.
So my team will still be tweeting out for me and Instagramming and all that stuff.
But I will have no access to anything.
I have written out a very short list of things that I consider of like dire, dire emergencies
that people close to me will be able to reach me somehow.
But I won't even have my phone on me.
They'll have to go through David.
But that's it.
I am completely gone till September 3rd.
Then on September 3rd, we've got a guest host who will sit in this very chair.
Look at me right there and basically fill me in on everything that I missed.
Ben Shapiro did it last year.
I think we're going to do somebody else this year.
We want to mix it up a little bit.
And Ben is touring, I think, with the Yao guys.
So that'll be fun.
I am gonna sign some of these while I'm talking to you guys.
So I'm gonna just grab a couple of these and I'm signing them to you.
Here, I'll just read off a couple names real quick.
Matthew, Stacy, Sean, Connor, Patrick, Calvin, Jacob, Jennifer, Kyle, Artem, Steve, Murr, Jacob, Missy, Aaron, Matthew, Andrew, Dave, Chris, Sully, Alex, Chris, Lisa, Jeffrey, and Pat.
Okay, so I'm gonna sign a couple of these.
And then I wanna tell you a little bit That's going to Lillian right there.
That is number one.
Oh wait, here's number one out of a thousand.
I want to make sure that one gets to Lillian.
All right, so that's for Lillian.
The rest of these are going.
They can't be personalized, obviously, but Lillian, we're taking good care of you and thank you for that.
So what I tried to do with the book, I wanted to blend some of the stories and things that have happened in this room that I think have been so culturally relevant with things that you guys don't know about me.
So I talk about personal stories and family stuff and things that I haven't opened up that much about, in some cases that I haven't opened up about at all before, and I sort of blend that to How I sort of came to be here right now, and how that relates to everything else politically.
So I thought maybe for—I'll tell you a couple things today, but I thought maybe the best way to do it for today is kind of just go back to the beginning, just sort of career-wise, because it has been quite an adventure.
You know, it's funny when you lock yourself in a room for a couple days a week, a couple hours a day, really trying to do something that's valuable, and it can really make you just sort of rethink Rethink everything.
And I think rethink, not just rethink everything, I think it can really help you solidify a lot of the things that you think.
So I think one of the things that I've really learned in the last six months or so as I've been writing this, and especially in the last couple months, as it really was getting whittled down into something, especially towards the end when I really wanted to say something, say something new and different, Um, is that it makes you challenge all the things that you think.
And when I had to do certain research on certain fact-based things and, you know, see potentially what my blind spots are and things like that.
Um, but then also go into my family history and be very, very appreciative of, uh, of where I came from.
And, and really we went way back into my family history because we were trying to find out what my American story is.
And actually, as I'm telling you this right now, um, today is July 30th.
2019.
My dad is not watching this right now, I don't think, because he is at his retirement party.
My dad turned 72 months ago, and he's retiring after, you know, a 45-year career.
He's worked at the same sales company in Midtown Manhattan for the last 34 years.
34 years, I think it's 34 years, he just celebrated this year, and he's retiring next week.
I think it's 34 years he just celebrated this year.
And he's retiring next week.
So it seems sort of fitting to me, as I'm writing this sort of family story and all
So it seems sort of fitting to me, as I'm writing this sort of family story and all
of this, that my dad, maybe he's watching this, maybe you guys are watching right now.
of this, that my dad—maybe he's watching this, maybe you guys are watching right now.
Dad, how are you, if you're watching, at the retirement party.
But it seems sort of fitting, like my dad's retiring right now, and I'm writing this story
that's about my family, but I'm not writing it to be an autobiography, and the book is
not an autobiography, although there are personal stories.
It's more to frame what my story is that brings me here, that is so exactly the same as most
of your stories are.
So we were trying to break it down, and it's like, on my dad's side, my great-great-grandparents
were first-generation immigrants from Belarus.
And my great-grandfather died while my grandfather was like six months old.
And they were—he had, I think, five brothers and sisters.
And they were living—I mean, it's the same old story that everybody hears.
They were living in the Lower East Side, which is where all the immigrants, especially from
Eastern Europe, came through Ellis Island, that they all lived.
And it was like, you know, basically one bedroom with five or six kids, and then my widowed
great-grandmother and my grandfather, who—they grew up with just absolutely nothing.
And then he worked—I remember my grandfather—grandpa already on my dad's side.
He died when I was in second grade, but I remember being around first grade or something, and he was a great golfer.
And I have a couple of his hole-in-one statues in the green room over there.
And I remember he was teaching me how to golf, and I remember him once telling me—he bought me a golf club, like a little kid's golf club—and I remember him once telling me that his first job was for 25 cents an hour.
So he grew up in abject poverty with parents that were, you know, from another country, first generation immigrants, and was lower class.
Then he worked really hard, became a lithographer.
My grandma Mimi, who he eventually married.
I was the first person in my family to go to college on either side, and then she ended up being a typing teacher in Brooklyn, but they became sort of—they were sort of lower middle class to middle class.
Then my parents moved on from that and became middle class to upper middle class.
I'm doing OK now.
Like, it's the great American story that it doesn't matter whether you're Italian or Jewish or Irish or Latino or black or white or whatever it is.
It's like we all have these stories in our families, and I wanted to sort of illustrate that.
Because I think one of the things that we're fighting right now is there is a feeling out there that somehow this experiment of America is somehow wrong or is a bust or we should feel guilty about it or something like that.
And I like calling it an experiment, which is a phrase that I got from Dennis Prager, actually, who I've interviewed here many times.
And I've done a couple of videos for PragerU because all America is, really, is an experiment.
Like, we're testing this thing out.
Can people live with maximum freedoms?
Can we have a country that welcomes people?
That they can bring all of their talents and skills and traditions and ethnic backgrounds and cultural backgrounds and fit into the tapestry of America while still respecting our freedoms.
We've done it here, that melting pot, better than any country in the history of the world.
And I think we don't step back to be appreciative of that.
So as I was writing this and learning more, I mean, this was truly a learning process.
I did Ancestry.com, which is one of the sponsors, by the way, of our podcast.
I think you can go to Ancestry.com slash Reuben.
But I did it in the midst of all this because I wanted to find out more about my family tree, to find out more about what my ancestors went through so that I could be a guy that sits in his garage talking to a camera about freedom.
I mean, that's pretty fucking spectacular.
It's incredible.
It's unimaginable.
I don't think any of my grandparents on either side could possibly imagine that this is real.
It's just incredible.
So anyway, what are we doing here?
I'm gonna do a couple radio resets while we're doing it.
Go to DontBurnThisBook.com and every single book that you buy today,
once you're there, you can click on the button and you can buy the book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble,
IndieBound.com, Apple Books, whatever it is.
You get your receipt emailed to you, forward that to, forward that to DontBurnThisBook at PRH.com,
PenguinRandomHouse.com, and your name's obviously in there, just include your address.
I will sign, as I'm doing right now, I'm gonna sign a book plate for ya, and you can put that in your book.
And we're already, I mean, the numbers seem incredibly good from what I'm seeing already.
We're climbing up all these Amazon charts, and the book's not even out for a couple months, which is pretty awesome.
And as I said, I'm in the editing process now, so I will not be editing during August, which actually I think is perfect, because I've given this thing my heart and soul over the last couple of months, and I really do need a break.
I need like a mental break just to not think about all of these things.
You know what I mean?
It's like, life has been very good to me.
The last couple years have been great.
We've built this because of you guys, right?
Like we're fully fan funded because of you.
I'm not beholden to a company or a person or anything.
I just do what I think is right.
Our team is expanding.
We're trying to figure out ways to grow and grow.
Oh, I don't want to fully give this away, but we're bringing somebody on the team in September.
That is going to be big.
It's a blue check verified person.
Now, that's all I'm going to say about it now.
So it's someone legit that you all know that's going to be a new part of what we're doing here.
That's going to be in September.
And we have a couple announcements actually in September coming.
So here we go.
In September.
So I'll be back on September 3rd, as I said.
And we will be making at least one big show announcement that very day.
I can't say more right now, but we will be doing that.
And I also want to say something about, I've teased this a little bit,
but in the course of the last couple months when Jordan Peterson and then Sam Harris and I,
when we all left Patreon because of the Sargon of Akkad thing
I had no idea.
We deleted our Patreon account and we were making, it was something like 70% of our monthly budget
that goes to producing this show was on Patreon.
And we deleted it.
I voluntarily deleted it and we moved everybody over to DaveRubin.com and we had no idea,
crowdfunding there if it was gonna work or whatever.
Not only did it work, we ended up actually making more because one of the things that I write about in this book
is I think there's a bravery deficit in the world.
People are afraid to step up and I think there's very good reasons
and I get into those reasons too because the mob just destroys people.
It's just like this endless, you know what?
The mob is like the nothing from Neverending Story.
You remember the Neverending Story?
It's just this amorphous black cloud that just destroys everything in its path.
And this is pretty fitting and I write about this, but in the Neverending Story,
you know what has to beat the nothing is.
is the human imagination.
In the book, in the movie, it's the imagination of a child.
And I think that that's what we need right now.
We need a rebirth of imagination.
And I'm starting to see lots of seeds of that that I'm very enthused about, actually.
So, I'm signing books.
Oh, so, anyway, within all of this, not only did we figure out this deal
that I'll announce in September, I just can't say more now, but wrote the book, did the show every week,
which I still think is pretty damn good, and you guys are still digging it and that's great.
But I also started a tech company in the midst of this because the Patreon thing happened and as you know it was like suddenly like there were all these issues about deplatforming and censorship and payment processors and all these things.
So I also started a tech company.
We got some nice VC, I don't touch a dime of that, that goes to To paying the project managers and the engineers and all that stuff.
And we're building out something that I hope to launch in beta also on September 3rd.
My guys are not going to be happy at me for saying that, but that's what I hope to happen on September 3rd.
And of course, if you're a subscriber now at DaveRubin.com slash donate, you will get first access to that.
I'm not asking anyone to donate right now.
I'm just saying that we're going to, the people that have been with us the longest are going to be the people that we're going to count on to help us, you know, work out the kinks and all that stuff.
So, there's just a lot going on, and that all kind of leads me to why I'm doing the Off the Grid thing.
And I will be challenging some public people.
I think Bridget Phetasy, who I had on the show a couple months ago, who's a great writer and comedian, I think she's going to join me for all of August Off the Grid.
And I'm going to challenge a couple other people.
But as I said, I hope maybe you guys can do it just in your own way, whatever that is.
Like, I get it, most people need to have a phone on them.
And for me, not having directions is going to be the craziest part.
I have GPS in my car, so I'll be okay with that.
But I have a terrible sense of direction, so just, like, wandering around will be tough.
But even, like, trying to meet somebody at a restaurant, and they're five minutes late, and you don't have a phone, and you're just going to stand on a corner like a schmuck.
Like, it's going to be something, but I want my brain to experience that.
I can tell you, after doing it last year, like, just my sense of patience and calmness and time.
Time felt longer, actually.
So I'm really looking forward to it, and I think I kind of deserve it after all this craziness.
It's all good.
All right, let me read off some names to you guys, because I see that you're still buying as we're talking.
It's DontBurnThisBook.com and then forward.
Your receipt, which you'll get immediately, regardless of where you buy it, you just forward your receipt to DontBurnThisBook at PRH.com, and I'm gonna sign it for you right now.
Oh, by the way, I didn't even say this the whole time, sorry.
Here's what we'll do also.
I will gladly take Q&A right now.
So we will do live Q&A.
So if you buy the book, just include a question, forward the receipt, just include a question up top, and I'll answer some questions live.
So DontBurnThisBook at PRH.com.
You have to forward your receipt, Put a question in there, I will answer some questions.
Shoutouts to Barbara, Mike, Gregory, Garrett, Adam, Vaughn, Erica, Mark, Gina, Aaron, Robert, Jeff, Bradford, Jacob, Xander, Terry, Joshua, Vincent, Paul, Morgan, Kay, Andrew, Evan, Matt, Richard, Nicholas, Chad, Rick, Michael, Derek, Jason, Marcy.
I'll see if I can do more of those later.
That was a good crew.
Getting a little head rush.
Oh man, they're really coming in right now.
Okay, so yeah, so if you buy the book, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple Book, etc., Indie Bound, forward the receipt, put a question in there, and my guys are gonna throw me some questions live in a little bit.
So one of the things that...
I will tell you a little bit about sort of the adventure about all this because a lot of times people say to me when I when I do road gigs people will say to me that you know they'll say nice things like you're a good interviewer or you know I enjoy the show and that sort of thing but they do often want to know more about me a little bit more about I'm a true New Yorker, really.
I was born in Brooklyn.
talk about sort of my professional adventure in all this as well.
So I'll give you guys just a little bit of that right now because a lot of it's been,
it's been rattling around my head as I wrote this.
So for those of you that don't know, so I'm a true New Yorker, really.
I was born in Brooklyn, I grew up in Long Island.
I lived in New York City most of my adult life.
And I went to SUNY Binghamton, which is State University of New York
at Binghamton for college.
And then it was in February of 2013 that I moved to Los Angeles.
So it's kind of funny because I know that actually these days probably,
Most of my fan base, or most of the people that appreciate what I do, are probably in the middle of the country, if we're just looking at this from an American perspective.
But I've actually only lived in New York and L.A.
So when people talk about, like, the coast and the coastal elites and the big cities and whatever, it's like, I'm from those two places.
I have only lived, only, lived in New York and Los Angeles.
And for whatever reason, the things that I care about seem to really resonate with people in the middle of the country.
One of the reasons that doing the tour with Jordan was so great because there were so many cities that I had never been to, states that I had never, you know, I had never been to Nebraska, I had never been to Missouri, I had never been to Utah, and going to all of these places.
And then, you know, one of the other things that was cool is that during the tour, if I had a night off
or if we got into a city a day early or something like that, I would book a stand-up gig in the local city.
And we sold out, I think, pretty much every show that I did, usually a couple hundred seats,
and we were at improvs all over the place in a bunch of different clubs.
And then sometimes I would either fly in or depending on where we were,
I would bring one of the intellectual dark web people.
So when we were at the DC Improv, I had Christina Hoff Summers come on stage.
At the Phoenix Improv, I had Eric Weinstein fly in.
Brett Weinstein joined me for a couple of them up in Seattle and a few others.
And then the craziest one, though, was at, I think it's Wisecrackers in Salt Lake City.
unidentified
It's a great, great, great comedy club.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Probably about 300, 400 seats.
It was a madhouse.
The crowd was unbelievable.
I was just feeling it from the beginning.
And I don't do stand-up in a traditional way at all.
Like, I get up there, I got a couple jokes, but I'm just messing around with the crowd.
It's extremely politically incorrect.
I mock identity politics, and I'm throwing T-shirts out there to people that are doing crazy stuff.
It's like a three-ring circus.
And it's just real and different every time.
Anyway, so I usually do about 45 minutes to an hour, and then I bring on the guests.
So for that night, most of the audience had guessed who it was, because I was in Salt
Lake City, and everyone knew that Jordan Peterson was performing for the 12 Rules for Life the
next night.
But Jordan came onstage.
And it was—for me, it was the best night of the whole tour, because Jordan got up there.
And it's not like he told jokes up there, but we just kind of told some stories, and
we kind of ripped on each other.
He made fun of me a little bit, and I made fun of him.
And it was just—it was just a great night.
So anyway, I mention all this because just getting out there and meeting you guys over the last year, it's so different than what people see online.
So it's like people pretend that online is just real and it's like if you get out there and meet real people, it's all good.
Like everyone that comes up to me in real life at an airport or at the supermarket or at the freaking bowling alley, Like, people are great.
They really are great.
I don't think I've ever had someone come up to me and say something mean.
I was at Ikea a couple weeks ago, and there was a guy with green hair, kind of pudgy guy, like leaning against the wall, and he was kind of looking at me like this, and I was like, all right, I get it.
I get it, soy boy.
That's all right.
You don't like me, that's okay.
But the point is that people are good, and I think what I've tried to do with this show, and what I tried to do with the book, is show that what those political differences that we have are, They seem huge.
They seem monumental and they seem insurmountable.
But you want to live in a country that people have different differences of opinions, right?
You want to live in a country like that.
What you don't want is people to be allowed to impose their opinions on you.
And I tried in this book to lay out the best ideas that will sort of allow maximum freedom for as many people as possible.
Now, I do that, of course, through the lens of classical liberalism.
And by the way, there's such an interesting thing happening in the world right now.
Where there's all these articles being written about post-liberalism.
Is liberalism at its end?
Like, is the end of liberalism just what the social justice warriors have wrought upon us?
And there's an interesting argument for that, that liberalism in and of itself isn't enough.
Like, secular liberalism isn't enough in and of itself to stand up to this woke, progressive monster.
And I think there's an interesting argument there.
I push back on that a bit, and I sort of expand on it a bit, and that, you know, conservatives, if conservatives look generally at the world through a bit of a religious lens, right?
So they look at the world that there is a moral code and rules outside of you as a human being, right?
And our founders, in many ways, they were sort of a blend at some level between what
you would say is a classical liberal, individual rights, limited government, and then also
had some conservative piece there, because they would talk about freedom from religion
and freedom of religion, while saying that the rights that were guaranteed to us in the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights were God-given rights, meaning they come from something before
us.
And so I really get into that, which I think is one of the most fascinating topics.
It's exactly what Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris were debating about during those debates, the sort of nature of truth and where does morality come from and can there be such a purely secular morality.
Now, of course, I believe that purely secular people can be moral and religious people can be Immoral and all of that.
But how do you build societies around that?
Where does that place liberalism right now?
And what I also hope for and what I see all the time, and I get a ton of hate for this, is that modern conservatives have proven to me time and time again to be extremely tolerant and liberal.
Well, liberal, actually, in a certain sense.
They've been shown to me that, look, Something like gay marriage.
Conservatives don't care about it anymore.
And a conservative principle of limited government and getting the government out of your life—now, they may not like it from a religious perspective, and I can actually respect that, which is why I can sit in my own home, where I'm married to a man, with Ben Shapiro, who has a religious perspective on gay marriage, which, by the way, was the perspective that almost everybody had in the world until about 10 years ago.
It's the perspective that Barack Obama ran on first time around, right?
But what I want to see out of the conservatives, and what I'm seeing, and what I talk about in this book, is I think conservatism doesn't have to give up any of the things it believes, but carve out a little space for the liberals that are trying to find a new home.
Try to find a place for the secularists, the atheists.
Don't make everything about what you want the world to be religiously, sort of.
Go to those true conservative values.
And I'm just completely fascinated by this new alignment, because I'm seeing it in real life.
I'm seeing it in real life.
When I do stand-up, I usually poll the audience.
I do some funny stuff about, you know, how many conservatives, how many libertarians, how many progressives.
There's always one guy that can barely clap.
You know, and the rest of it.
What I see is all these people that have wildly different opinions on taxes, on abortion, on death penalty, all of these things.
When I go up there and, you know, most of the audience, usually I'd say something about like 50% of the audience usually applauds for conservatives.
Then I would say another 30% applause for libertarians, and there's a lot of overlap on that.
And the libertarians, I would say at this point, are my true people, because I just really believe in live and let live.
That's really what it all whittles down to for me.
But what I see is that people actually love Believe it or not, guys, they love being in a room with other people and looking around and going, oh, there's a black guy that happens to be conservative, or there's a conservative that happens to be black, and there's an older white woman who's a liberal, and no one cares about any of that.
Like, even to have to frame it in that stupid way, and that's kind of the way I do these shows.
So I will get back out on tour, by the way.
Stand-up.
We'll start that again in September.
And then, when the book comes out in April, We're gonna do a big book tour, and we're trying to figure that out, and we'll see how Jordan may or may not be involved, depending on what's going on with him.
And just again, Jordan, if you're watching this, I cannot, cannot possibly thank you enough for just including me in everything that you did in the last year, and letting me be part of that magical tour, because it led to this.
It led to this, right?
That's pretty incredible.
So what are we doing right now, people?
Everyone that buys my book, Don't burn this book dot com which went on sale today and is at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Apple Books and more.
Go to DontBurnThisBook.com, click one of those links, buy the book, forward your receipt over to DontBurnThisBook at PRH.com.
And we're gonna sign, we, when I say we, I mean me, I am going to sign a bookplate for you right now.
The first thousand were numbered.
We're way past that point at this point, but I'm just gonna keep going here.
And I'll sign as many thousand as we sell today.
I will gladly do it.
I'm thrilled to do it, actually.
Okay, let's see.
I see a couple questions here.
Do you think you'll have Colin Moriarty back on the show anytime soon?
Absolutely.
He's always welcome to come back.
I tried to have dinner with him last week, but he wasn't able to do it.
Colin, you know, he's another example of one of these people that gets thrust into the culture war.
And I think I left this chapter in, actually.
We had moved a couple things around as we'd begun the editing process.
But one of the things I talk about is how it's nuts.
These people are not special or spectacular that you know of for doing these things.
One of the things that put Jordan on the map was talking about Bill C-17 in Canada, about where the government was going to fine people about using trans people's preferred pronouns, and they wanted to compel speech, which is ridiculous.
Jordan just said, I'm not going to do that.
I'm not against trans people.
But then, of course, he gets labeled a transphobe, a bigot, a homophobe, all that.
Brett Weinstein says, I am not going to not go to campus one day as a white person because you don't want me to.
If students of color don't want to go to campus one day to honor whatever it is that they want to honor, that's fine.
That's gone on for many years.
But Brett protested segregating campus by the color of people's skin,
and then he gets thrust into it.
So Jordan gets thrust in, Brett gets thrust in.
James Damore, who I mentioned before, he gets thrust in because Google asks him
to go to a diversity training session and write his feelings about it,
which is exactly what he does, they fire him.
Lindsey Shepard, who I talked about earlier.
All of these people, so Colin is another interesting one.
Colin's a video game guy, right?
And he basically, I had him on here, while he was basically a gamer,
he had a lot of libertarian beliefs, he's a great guy, just a genuine, good, decent human being.
And he's a video game guy, he sends out a tweet on, I think it was on International Women's Day,
and it was something like, finally some peace and quiet.
Hashtag International Women's Day.
And the tweet blows up.
The outrage mob goes after him.
And was it the International Business Times?
My guys can check on this.
I think it was the International Business Times wrote an article about Colin Moriarty's racist tweet.
There was literally nothing about race in there.
And he was writing it, by the way, while he was in bed with his girlfriend.
So the people that were saying he was misogynistic, his girlfriend was in bed with him.
But then he gets thrust into it.
He then, of course, you know, what happens was finally I was able to get a contact of somebody at International Business Times.
I hope that's the correct one.
And they were able to retract the piece that he didn't write anything racist.
But, you know, that's a day later once stuff is already out there in the Ethernet.
And it's like, you know, out there in the Ether.
That's funny.
The Ethernet.
It's out there in the Ether, on the Internet.
And then, you know, it gets in people's Wikipedia pages and all that.
So, so many of us have just been kind of thrust into this thing, but I don't think any of us inherently are something special other than we're just doing what we think is right.
That really is it.
Okay, let's see.
New orders!
Orders that were just taken here.
I'll just do a couple that were just taken because we've been getting them all day.
But these were just taken during the live stream.
Jeff, Clark, Tollan, Dwayne, Colson, Joshua, Jerome, Brad, Molly, Carrie, Zachary, John, Douglas, Arlie, Gary, Brian, Josh, Laszlo, Aubrey, Samuel, Garrett, AJ, Joe, Jacob, Matt, Andy, Marsurio, Chad, Paul, Spencer, Charles, Jovita, and Klo.
Or Chloe, thank you guys.
We're signing every copy for you.
And remember, if you go to DontBurnThisBook.com, forward us your receipt.
I'm going to sign one of these book plates for you.
You can put it in the book.
And if you're getting the digital copy, by the way, which is out right now, you can put it on the back of your Kindle or whatever, or you can slap it on your laptop or wherever else.
And if you email us, Don't burn this book at PRH.com.
You can put a question in there.
So just put a question for me right now, live, above your receipt and I will gladly answer some questions.
So I see a couple more in here.
Saw you and Jordan in Utah.
Looking forward to reading the book.
It was wise guys, not wise crackers.
That's what happens.
The comedy club was called Wise Guys, not Wise Crackers, but I'm sure there's a comedy club called Wise Crackers.
Yeah, I hope you enjoyed the show.
It was just a great, what a great night.
It was just a great night.
Another question, how does one get out of the audience and into the effort?
So, you know, this is one of the questions that I get more than anything else when I speak at colleges or just any events that I do.
I was at a Young Americans for Liberty event in San Jose last week.
I was at an ARI event in Cleveland a couple weeks before that.
We aired that one, actually, on the channel.
That was with Yaron Brook and a couple other people talking about tech censorship and all that.
But one of the things people Keep asking me.
And by the way, when I was on tour with Jordan, people asked this question of Jordan all the time.
And I was in charge, for those of you that never got to see one of the live shows, the way the show went with Jordan,
was that I would do 10 or 15 minutes up top, just make everybody laugh, have fun, look around the room,
realize that you're not in a room full of racists, bigot, homophobes, these are good people, the audiences,
they would say it's all angry white men.
You'd look around the room and it was usually like 60, 40, male to female, but sometimes probably 50, 50, if not more.
There'd be black people, white people, trans people, Muslim people, nobody cared about any of that nonsense.
So, and I'd make silly lobster jokes and the rest of it, just get the crowd going for Jordan, it's not my night.
I was purely there just to basically just toss it up to him so he could just knock it out of the park, right?
That was it.
And that's what I did.
And so I would do that, then Jordan would give a different, I mean, people, I say this, and people can't really
understand how just staggeringly incredible this is.
The guy gave a different lecture every single night.
I never saw the same lecture twice.
Never saw the same lecture twice.
I could see on nights, and this is how this guy's mind works.
I could see on nights where he would start thinking through an idea on stage and he would sort of take it to exactly where he felt he couldn't take it any longer.
So he would like stretch out the idea as long as possible.
And then the next night, after having a night to sleep on it, to think about it, travel, he would take it a little bit further.
And the way he would use a story to explain that, where he would say that when he was younger and his daughter Michaela would be climbing a tree in front of the house, that he would watch her and one day she could stretch her leg out a little a little bit to get to another branch,
and then she would pull back, and then the next day she'd try it again,
but couldn't quite get there, but then over time you keep going, keep going, and keep
going and that was what he was doing intellectually every night.
So it was really great.
But the question that we got all the time and that I get at all these college gigs
is how do you get into the fight?
And that really in many ways is one of the core points of this book.
Because as I said, all of these people that you know that you watch on YouTube
or that are slammed by the media or that are misunderstood or deplatformed
or the rest of it, Like...
Most of these people are not bad people, and they're also not exceptional people, as I'm saying.
They're just people doing what they think is right.
But what they've done is, for some reason—and I guess I'm included in this—for some reason, we're willing to say what we think.
And I think That if you start saying what you think, that you can have an effect that you cannot even imagine.
You can have an immeasurably positive effect on the world.
Imagine if you started doing that.
Now, I'm guessing if you're watching this, you're not an evil racist bigoted homophobe.
You may have some libertarian beliefs, some classical liberal beliefs.
You may have some outside-the-box political beliefs.
Michael Malice, who I've had in here all the time, who's basically an anarchist.
I love the guy.
He's a truly unique political thinker.
Some of his stuff is sort of off the rails, but it's great to think about, and he's a true character, right?
Whatever your thoughts are, imagine if you started speaking up more.
It seems to me that right now what's happening, and this is one of the things I talk about a lot, is that One of the reasons the mob just keeps encroaching is because it's preying on the fear of good people to be quiet.
And I think what's happening is that good people think, oh, this thing's just going to pass.
You know, like, that somehow, if I'm just quiet enough, long enough, that these really awful authoritarian forces and this Socialist movement that's growing and the ideas of collectivism and this anti-capitalist hatred and this hatred of of white men and of Christians and of Jews and all of this stuff that it'll just kind of go away but actually your acquiescence feeds it and it feeds it more and more and more and I really believe if more of you whatever that means to you whatever that means like if that means that you know you're you're in a relationship and your spouse is
is constantly on the attack about politics, or whatever it is, whatever's happening culturally, and you just turn the other cheek all the time because you think it's just the easier way.
You're giving space for bad ideas to grow, and I think that that's how we got into this situation.
Too many people were cowed by the false cries of racism and bigotry and all of that stuff.
It was a really effective but truly evil tactic that mostly the progressive left used and
embraced and weaponized to silence a lot of good people.
And it takes growing some balls to get up and start saying what you think.
But imagine if you started doing that.
Maybe you'd inspire someone, one of your coworkers or your buddy or your brother or your cousin
to do it too.
And then if more of us just started doing it.
I'm not saying shout people down or deplatform people.
Don't be as bad as them.
I mean, that's the other part of it, right?
One of the ways I think truly that we get out of this is that for this new alliance that I think is a sort of center-right, sort of freedom, liberty-based alliance that has, you know, some conservative elements and some libertarian elements and the disaffected lefties and the rest of it, all that thing really has to do Is just be a little bit better as we're watching the progressives decimate what's left of the decent liberals, and there's almost none of them left, right?
We're in Order 66 land at this point, right?
The Last Jedi are strewn throughout the galaxy and they're being hunted down by their own troops.
I mean, that really is what's happening here.
We're watching the left sort of just eat all of its good people.
And that's why, even tonight, within the hour, I think, there is a democratic debate.
And all it's going to be is a litany of identity politics and class warfare and hating white men and, ¿Dónde la biblioteca?
Mi amigo es grande.
¿Dónde mis zapatos?
Es blanco.
I mean, just this ridiculous pandering to people and speaking languages.
I mean, that thing is just the absolute craziest from the last one, that they started all speaking in Spanish.
It's so pandering.
It's just awful.
Imagine in the 1930s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, we get all these immigrants from all over Europe.
And imagine if the presidential candidates had gotten up there.
You know, and been like, oh, I see we've got a lot of new Irish citizens!
unidentified
I'm gonna give a shillelagh and a potato to all of ya!
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
It's like, what?
We would think that that's either racist or ridiculous or, at best, the worst pandering nonsense, you know?
It's a spicy meatball!
unidentified
Everybody is gonna get a meatball for all my Italian friends, you know?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
It's like, what are we letting these guys get away with?
You know, it's like, yeah, like a guy's going to get up there, he's like, I'm schmuck like me, I'm like Jackie Mason, so all the Jews are going to get a good filter fish.
It's like, why, why do we put up with this nonsense?
But there's a reason we put up with it because the good liberals don't know how to fight that stuff.
And you can see, so someone like Biden, who should be mostly a decent kind of old school liberal moderate, he's just being eaten alive right now because he doesn't have enough to stand on to fight this.
So they just call him a racist and it just counts.
You know, come on, he's a racist.
Well, I guess he's a racist.
It's craziness, people.
What the hell are we doing here?
Don'tBurnThisBook.com.
It is my new book.
It is officially up for presale today.
That is right.
I've been writing this thing for months.
I'm thrilled to finally be able to share it with you.
I am signing book plates that you guys will be able to put in the book.
I am signing Every single freaking copy that we sell today, whether you buy it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Apple Book, wherever it is, and if you forward the receipt, so once you buy the book, if you forward the receipt to DontBurnThisBook at PRH.com, we will send the signed plate to you.
Here, I'll even sign one right now.
Could be yours, right there.
That could be yours.
And not only that, but you can also ask questions in there.
So just put a question in the forwarded email.
And I've got an iPad here, a fancy iPad.
And holy cow!
Right now, we are number 35 in the bestseller list on Amazon in all books.
Right now.
No one even has the book yet.
That's pretty freaking amazing.
You guys are incredible.
Truly incredible.
Like, my whole life is coming together.
This is like, this is like, this is your life happening all at the same moment right now.
You guys are absolutely, absolutely incredible.
All right, shout out Cynthia, Wesley, Peter, Emily, Joshua, Hunter, John, Paul, David, Case, David, Lauren, Michael, Nicholas, Justin, Paulette, William, Alyssa, Andrew, Christopher, Eric, Zach, Kyle, Stephanie, Ben, Courtney, Jadis, Glenn, Jennifer, Adam, James, Luke, Brendan, Daniel, Rob, I'll get to you next.
We'll start at Rob, guys, after that one.
Holy cow.
All right.
Let's see.
Here we go.
I'll answer some of the questions.
So, are you, Jordan, or any of the others from the IDW coming to Connecticut anytime soon?
Also, can my dog, Val, get a shout-out on the livestream?
That was from Zach.
All right.
Well, Val, you just got a shout-out.
Actually, real quick, I'll give you guys an update on our dog, Emma.
So, I think most of you guys know at this point.
So, Emma, who was a rescue from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans back in summer of 2005—I got her in June of 2006.
You know, the dogs had been dispersed all over the place, all over the country.
She was very, very sick from drinking oil and living through whatever she had to live through there.
She actually gave birth during the hurricane.
They found her in a little box at St.
Bernard's Parish, which I just found out about, and I'll tell you why in a sec.
And she was nursing.
The puppies were healthy.
The puppies, the three puppies, got adopted immediately.
We got Emma, and now at the time, she's had three names.
Just bear with me if you've heard this story before.
She's had three names, because she had a name in New Orleans that we don't know, because she had a collar with no tags.
Then at the Humane Society, they named her Paisley, and then when we got her, we named her Emma.
Now, I got her in June, on June 22nd, actually, of 2006, which was about, you know, that's what, eight, nine months after the hurricane, and she was finally, had been brought back to health, and she was able to be adopted.
And we got her, and I was walking her in Central Park, first day I had her, and this woman came up to me and said, is that Paisley from the Humane Society?
And I said, yeah.
And she said, this is her son Bernard.
And Bernard and Emma got together, and they sniffed butt like only a mother and son could.
And then Bernard ended up moving, and then we lost contact for like 13 years.
And then get this, so then a few months ago, about five months ago now actually, we found out that Emma has pretty severe bladder cancer.
And she's actually doing great.
The veterinary oncologist gave her two to five months.
She's now past the five-month mark.
She's having a little bit of arthritis now that's actually bothering her more than the cancer, but we basically just changed her diet.
It's all organic, home-cooked food and some CBD and some other stuff, but no conventional medicine, no chemo, none of that stuff.
And anyway, as I'm sure many of you have seen, I had posted long Twitter threads of pictures with her over the years, and I don't really remember my life before her.
And I remember nights in New York City when I lived in this shitty little crappy apartment on Amsterdam, and the heat would go out for days in the middle of a blizzard, and there would be nights I would be snuggled with Emma just for warmth.
And anyway, sent this out, and then long story short, we got in touch with the woman that owned Bernard, Bernard's owner, and St.
Bernard's Church, that's how he got named Bernard.
And it turns out that she lives only like 15 minutes away from us here in Los Angeles, And we've gotten them together a couple times.
We did it on Mother's Day, and I've posted some pictures on my Instagram of that, so you can check it out.
It's instagram.com slash ReubenReport.
And it's just been a great story, so happy to give a shout-out to Val and any of the dogs out there.
Okay, all right, you know what?
I'll do a couple more names, and then we'll jump back in.
Rob, Mary Ellen, Jenny, Rob, again, with two Bs, Rayanne, Nicholas, Kevin, Michael, Christopher, Starmichael, Chris, Michael, Vesper, Colleen, Haig, Lucas, Alex, Barry, Katie, Chris, Jared, Jake, to Ori, Michelle, Pamela, Cody, Aaron, and Nicholas.
All right, you guys can delete those.
I'll keep going in a second.
I'm gonna sign some more books here.
I'm doing a thousand things at once.
What the hell are we doing here, people?
DontBurnThisBook.com.
My book, it's out!
For pre-sale.
We've got pre-advanced messages on the back already.
They call it advance notice, basically, from Ben Shapiro and from Peter Thiel and from Larry King and from Tucker Carlson.
And, you know, these are all people who have orbited my world that I have some political disagreements with, some agreements.
But as I said, these new alliances and these These new tents are going up right now and it's like, I think it's on all of us.
You know, it's so interesting because so many people...
At least at the social media level of it seem like they're so depressed about the way the world is and everything's awful and it's just terrible and it's like no if you if you actually step back a little bit you will see something incredible going on there are so many more people engaged right now so many more people thinking about what they think and why they think it and that's why that's why I'm writing this book and that's why the The subtitle is Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason, because I'm actually—and this was—we had a whole bunch of discussions with the publishers on this, but I'm really not—this is not a book where I'm telling you what to believe politically.
There are actual moments in this where there's a chapter, actually, where I lay out—I take, like, most of the hot-button issues of the day, so, say, abortion and death penalty and taxes and gay marriage and foreign policy and all of these things.
And I lay out my beliefs on them and through the lens of classical liberalism, which is
the lens that I look at things.
But I'm not telling you that you have to believe these things.
I actually make the argument, so like in a case of abortion, for example, I make the
argument that absolutely there are good people on both sides.
I don't think it's the case that people on the right hate women, and I don't think it's
the case that people on the left hate babies.
And that what are the ways that we can talk about an issue like this while respecting
the general beliefs of rights for the individual.
And why abortion, of course, is such a complex one on this is because generally people on
the left put more...
Well, they don't believe in the individual as much, but in this case they believe that it's the individual, meaning the woman's right to choose, where the people on the right believe that the fetus has a right to life as well.
And it's just a different way of looking at the world, and that's what we have to bridge, and you want to live in a country with people where you can really argue those things.
What I find interesting about the abortion debate, and I reference this in the book, Is that I find people on the right, so the pro-life people, are far more willing to engage in good faith than people on the left.
Now that obviously is a theme a lot politically these days, but I've had many people in this very studio
who are more than happy to debate, and not even debate, just have an honest,
open conversation with pro-choice people.
And even though I consider myself begrudgingly pro-choice, I see people on the right trying to reach out.
It's very rare that you see someone on the left that's really willing to engage with someone on the right.
If you're watching this and you know of somebody, if you've got somebody that's a published author
or an outspoken online personality with a decent following that is willing to engage
and not call people names and all those things, like I'd love to set some of those debates up.
I'd love to have those conversations.
But what I try to lay out are just the basic guidelines for you to know how to engage with people on the right.
how to think about the issues.
And if you come to a different conclusion than I do, then more power to you, I suppose.
All right, DontBurnThisBook.com.
I am signing every single copy that we sell today till midnight tonight, I believe.
And you're gonna go to DontBurnThisBook.com where you can buy the book, then forward your receipt to DontBurnThisBook at prh.com, penguinrandomhouse.com.
And then you can actually put a question for me that I'll read on the livestream right now if you've got some questions.
Oh, I see we got a couple more here.
And I'll answer the question live right there.
And what am I doing?
I'm signing book plates, people.
Book.
That was a terrible signature.
I'm not doing that one.
That one's going away.
Here we go.
I'll make that one up for you.
I'll give you a primo Dave Rubin signature.
That's nice right there.
Okay, there you go.
Here we go.
I'm going to do some new orders.
Brad, Joseph, Vin, Connor, Matthew, Richard, Nathaniel, Corey, Nathan, Beth, Scott, Jack, Luke, Hope, Lance, Brad, James, Bradley, William, Daniel, Lisa, Phillip, Ricardo, Patrick, Lonnie, Roxanna, Josh, Howard, Camille, Ina, Todd, Colby, Jordan, Creighton, Ian, Melanie, Lori, Alexandria, Charles, Adam, Robert, Darlene, Bruce, Scott, Steve, Jonathan, Janet, Kyle, Kevin, Krista, Robert, Brian, Michael, Gabriel, Matilda, Ken, and Andrew.
Thank you for buying the book.
Appreciate it.
Okay, let's see.
Oh, this is a really interesting question.
How can we teach American children the entrepreneurial mindset on a large scale?
Well, I think the first thing that you have to teach them, basically, is understand why this thing here in America, why Western civilization that is rooted in the individual, individual rights, that we should have individual rights where no group has a right.
But you as an individual should be treated equally regardless of your sex, gender, race, color, ethnicity, any of those things.
That's what we have in the United States.
We haven't always had it, right?
We had slavery.
We don't have it anymore.
That is fantastic.
Women could not vote.
They can vote now.
That is spectacular.
Gay people could not get married.
They can now.
That is wonderful.
The arc of justice, of true justice, not social justice, which is neither social nor justice, the arc of true justice has always bent towards more freedom.
That is what we have done here in the United States.
That's why people now are dying to get into the United States.
No one is dying to get out.
When Trump even says to people that they should get out if they don't like it here, now you
may not like the way he says it, you may not appreciate who he's saying it to or any of
the political, nonsensical machinations of the day, but it's an interesting point.
If we're so horrible, if the patriarchy and capitalism and our health care and all these
things, it's so freaking terrible, then why do you guys want to let everybody in?
Why would you subject people to the horrors, the abject horrors of the United States?
I just don't know why.
So what can we do to get people more into the entrepreneurial spirit?
I can tell you this, I mean I've said this before, but I can tell you that one of the really cool things
about my adventure in the last couple years is that, and I write about this in the book as well,
is that so I did stand up in New York for about 12 years and that came with all of the struggles of being a comic
and the good parts about it and getting past the clubs and handing out tickets.
I used to hand out, we used to call it barking, I would stand in Times Square and hand out tickets,
sometimes two hours a night, six nights a week, rain nor sleet nor snow, no matter what the weather,
we'd be out there just to perform in front of a couple people and I started some comedy clubs,
we did some really great entrepreneurial things with some of the other comics,
but I did that for a while.
Eventually, I had a show on SiriusXM for a while.
That eventually got me to The Young Turks.
Then, very briefly, when I left them, I left for Riot, which was an internet startup.
And we just quickly kind of realized, even though I liked everybody there, we kind of realized we were going in different directions.
That's when Larry King and Aura TV contacted me, and that's when the show really started exploding.
So I know the date.
I believe it's September 9th, 2015, was that first interview that we did with Sam Harris.
I think that's the day we posted it.
I think we shot it the day before.
And that's really when the show blew up.
And then from Aura TV, that's when I realized the show was growing faster than the network itself,
and we decided to leave, which had a lot to do with the conversation
that I had on the show with Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute.
He was talking about rational self-interest and taking control of your own destiny
and believing in yourself as an individual.
And I realized, wow, that's what I wanna do.
I wanna go independent.
That's when we launched on Patreon in June of 2016, which, you know, now it sounds like a long time ago, but we...
Patreon was just brand new at the moment, and it was mostly video gamers on there.
Now a lot of people are on there, but there were none of the political people on there.
And I was the first one, and we kind of broke the ice for everybody, and then a whole bunch of people went on, and now a whole bunch of people have gone off.
But then from there, we went independent.
I didn't know if it was going to work or not.
We stayed on Patreon for, what, two, three years.
Then when this thing happened in December with Sargon of Akkad and him getting deplatformed, I left Patreon again to go fully independent.
on our own website and do all our funding ourselves.
And along the road, we were able to buy this house because of you guys.
We built this incredible studio.
I mean, everybody comes in to my garage.
This is my freaking garage.
Everyone that comes in here, I will never forget it.
When Tucker Carlson walked into that studio, he opens up the door, the garage door right
there.
So when you walk into my house, the garage is immediately to the right.
So the way we have it, and I'll do some behind the scenes things in the fall, giving you guys a little more tour.
We have a green room over there where guests have a fridge and coffee and soda and video games and water.
I've got some Star Wars stuff in there and whatever.
That's just for everybody to relax and chill out.
Right over here is our control room.
That's where my team stays during the show and Aaron, our director, and all the rest of my guys that are taking notes and doing whatever it is that they're doing.
And anyway, Tucker Carlson, who is the star of the highest rated show on Fox News.
I think he might be the highest paid person in cable TV.
I'm not sure.
I go on a show now basically once a week.
I don't get paid for that.
I'm happy to do it.
They never asked me before for any pre-advanced questions.
We go on live.
I say whatever I want.
I'd be happy to do that on CNN or MSNBC too, but they don't invite me.
But in any event, Tucker opened the door, or actually David opened the door for Tucker.
Tucker walks in.
And he looks up and we have nice big 15 foot high ceiling so we've been able to build a really cool lighting grid.
I'll show you guys some behind the scenes stuff some other time.
And this is an absolute pro studio here.
And Tucker, I'm sitting here, he walks in, I was like, hey, how you doing?
And he was like, holy shit, man, you have done it right.
And to hear that, and I hear that message more and more and more from different guests, like we've built something that is truly professional here that I own and control.
And I relate that back to your question about entrepreneurialism.
Which is, those are the stories that need to be heard, you know what I mean?
Like that's, I write about that story in this book because I think once you start seeing
that there are everything that's cool, everything that's cool, whether it's music or comedy
or art or anything, a physical structure, a house that's built that's really cool
or a new car that comes out that's awesome, these are individual people that come together
to do something together and build something cool.
It is so rarely the government that does that.
Now I'm not saying there's no need for government, but it's the human spirit,
it's the American spirit in this case.
And I think we have to show people more of these stories that you can go grab that dream.
It's not a guarantee, it's a dream.
But all you can ask for is equal rights, man.
You just want equal rights.
Get me in here, treat me equally.
It doesn't mean people aren't gonna be mean.
It doesn't mean someone grew up having more and someone grew up having less
and I got a limp and I got a lazy eye and da-da-da-do.
We've all got shit, we've all got it.
But if you...
Get out there and give it your best shot.
I actually believe good things can happen and I consistently see it I consistently see it because I go to shows Where I meet you know I do meet and greets after and I meet people and then I see other people start talking to each other You know if there's a line let's say and I'm talking to some people I'll see out of the corner my other people start talking next thing You know people are going out to drinks together sometimes I've gone out to dinners with people after the show like people want to find other people to build something with to do something entrepreneurial with so it's actually a A very cool thing.
Don'tburnthisbook.com, people.
I am signing every single copy that we sell today.
I haven't signed any in the last few minutes.
I am signing every single copy that we sell today.
We're apparently doing extremely well on Amazon right now, so I'm I'm thrilled about that.
If you guys want to give me give me an update on that, that would be great.
So what we're doing is I'm signing these book plates.
You will be mailed this book plate.
You can put it in your copy of Don't Burn This Book, or if you get one of the digital copies, you can put it on the back of your iPad or your computer or your laptop or your, you know, your washing machine, whatever you'd like to do there.
Yeah, it's all good.
A lot of good things happen in people.
Okay, here I'll read off a couple names for you.
I'm just going to do ten this time, because I'm going to give myself an aneurysm if I keep doing it that way.
Tabitha Major, Christian, Stephen, Thomas, Alyssa, Eric Ross, I think that's two?
Eric Ross, Marcy, Gus, Joshua.
Alright, we'll stop there for now.
And don't forget, so once you go to the Don'tBurnThisBook.com, order the book whether you want to do it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, whatever you want to do, Apple Books, whatever it is, then you forward your receipt to Don'tBurnThisBook at PRH.com, that's PenguinRandomHouse.com, and you can insert a question in there, and I will read your question live!
I will gladly take your question right now, and then we'll go from there.
Okay, and actually, speaking of questions, let me do that right.
Real quick, so right now—so we've only sold the American rights to this book, so I see a lot of people are asking.
About the international rights, because I know that we've got, I just did this tour in Australia with Jordan, and we were in the UK, and we were in Ireland, and Norway, and Sweden, and all these great places.
We are currently, right now, they're negotiating, my guys are negotiating all the international rights.
So I promise you, when we get into each of these countries, we will do a full-on book signing thing again for all of you guys.
I'm not doing this just for Americans, you know, for those greedy Americans.
I will do this for everybody.
Apparently, some people in Canada have been going into Amazon, the American Amazon, and figuring it out that way.
I'm not telling you to do anything.
But I promise you, for every country that we get in, I promise you I will do one of these so you will have an opportunity.
And eventually, by the way, we will go on tour as well.
So I'll probably be on tour in May and June, and we'll see who I want to bring on tour with me and the rest of it.
Maybe I get Jordan Peterson open for me.
Now that would be something.
But at that point, I'll sign books and things in person.
You know, one of the reasons that I really wanted to write the book was on tour with Jordan.
I didn't have a book, right?
So, you know, all these people would be coming to meet and greets after or people coming up to me in the street and they'd be like, sign this book!
And I was signing Jordan's book and I started feeling guilty.
Or sometimes I'd sign other people's books or people would be like, you don't have a book, you know, can you just sign my arm?
So that was another reason that I wanted to do it.
So I promise you that we will do it internationally.
But that's great that we're doing so well on Amazon for now, without even the international sales.
So a couple questions, because if you buy the book at DontBurnThisBook.com, pick it up wherever you want to, forward the receipt to DontBurnThisBook at PRH.com, and then insert a question, and I will read a question live for you right now.
I miss our old Patreon chats.
Think you'll ever be able to do something like that again?
So on Patreon, one of the things that they had was a chat function on the app where I could just, if I was at an airport or I just had a few minutes, I could just send push notifications out to a couple thousand people and do a group chat there.
I don't want to say too much about this because my tech people won't be thrilled, but I told you before that we started a tech company in the last six months.
We are building something seriously cool that I think deals with so many of the deplatforming issues that allows creators to control their destiny more.
I just can't say too much yet, but people that are subscribed at DaveRubin.com slash donate, and I'm not asking anyone to donate right now.
I'm not asking anyone to subscribe.
This is about the book.
They will have first access to the beta version of this, which I'm hoping we can get this thing out on September 3rd, at least for the initial people, but certainly in the fall.
And there's a lot of cool things happening, and we'll see what the feature set is.
That's pretty much as much as I can say about that at the moment.
Do you think the Democrats will have to have a Phoenix-style rebirth before they'll be in touch with the general public again?
Do you think they will?
So this is a great question.
This is, and I write about this in Don't Burn This Book, Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason, by Dave Rubin, forward by Jordan B. Peterson, which you can buy at DontBurnThisBook.com.
I've talked about this a little bit before.
What has to happen?
to the left, what has to happen to the Democrats, what has to happen to the liberals.
As we watch the progressives and the democratic socialists who are going to drop the word
Democrat any day, it's fairly obvious, as they veer off further and further off the deep end,
and as they ransack the party, which I partly think is the intention, like I partly think
that the reason AOC and Tlaib and Omar and the rest of them say these crazy things all the time,
they know that it's all nonsense, but they're trying to destroy the last remnants of the
democratic party so that they can just take over the shell of it. Now, the question is,
well, is that going to happen?
And what does that become?
And that would really be horrific.
And by the way, if you're a standard conservative or something, you don't want to see them completely implode and really go off the deep end into the true collectivist, socialist, communist nonsense.
Because even though Maybe that is what they are, or something like that, like they're just becoming themselves.
I think we all, in a pluralistic society where we've got 320 some-odd million people, we want some sort of healthy balance, right?
You want something that makes sure both sides don't go too off into the extreme.
So on the right, let's say, you want to make sure that you don't want the people who want
the government to never help anybody under any circumstances whatsoever, which that's
sort of taking libertarianism to its nth degree, which is why I would say I'm a classical liberal,
which is, I would say, a little bit more of a realistic libertarian.
But I'm happy to argue where those margins and where those stop signs are, where those
parameters are.
You want there to be a healthy balance.
So what has to happen to the Democrats?
I mean, this is sort of, I do a lot at the end of the book that's about exactly this.
So I don't want to tip off too much.
Suffice to say is I don't see anything amongst any of the decent Democrats, any of the decent
liberals or the remaining institutions, but they're going to put a stop to this thing.
I mean, a lot of us have been waving the flag on this for quite some time, and then what do they do?
They call us a Nazi and a bigot, and New York Times runs slanderous pieces on us and the rest of it.
So I see no instance where the good liberals have enough to stand up on anymore.
That harkens back to what I was talking about an hour ago about what is liberalism based
in.
And if it's only based, actually, in just how we feel about things at any given moment,
then you can see why it's standing on quicksand versus why our founders set up a system that
these were God-given rights.
These rights came before you.
You're born free.
The government didn't make you free.
You're born free.
The government can take away your freedom, but it didn't give you your freedom.
These are hugely different ways to view the world.
I think clearly you know where I stand on these things, and that's why I often say now, defending my liberal values is becoming a conservative principle, or defending my liberal principles is becoming a conservative value.
So what has to happen?
I mean, to me, it seems that what you just prescribed right there is what has to happen.
They have to sort of, the bad ideas of socialism, of leftism, of collectivism, have to collapse, sort of destroy and eat themselves, which they will, right?
Like, they will destroy Bernie one day.
Like, he may have moved the dial, but now he moved the dial and they're gonna come for him, because he's just an old white man who's got three houses and he's a multimillionaire, you know?
and they'll come for him too, and they have to just destroy themselves,
and then out of that, perhaps a phoenix could rise, right?
Like, that's the idea there.
I think that's it.
But as I say in the book, if you're out there, and you're a good, decent, liberal,
You're a blue dog liberal.
You're a JFK liberal.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
If you don't want your children to be judged by the color of their skin, which is exactly what the progressives are offering, if you want something different than that, stand up liberals.
Start fighting.
Fight the progressives back.
And prove me wrong.
And I'll come crawling back.
I write it in the book.
Prove me wrong.
I'll have a mea culpa.
Oh, man, I was wrong on that one.
What a great ending, because I don't need to be right.
I want this world to remain sane.
So prove me wrong, people.
That would be a pleasure.
All right.
I'm signing book plates.
Don'tburnthisbook.com, guys.
I'm selling our pre-sale of my new book.
And every single copy that we sell today on July 30th is getting a signature, and I'm signing them right now, and apparently we're doing super awesome good on Amazon and some of the other sites.
Okay, here we go.
What you do is, as I said, go to DontBurnThisBook.com, buy the book on Amazon or on Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, whatever it is, forward your receipt to DontBurnThisBook at prh.com, penguinrandomhouse.com, and then you can put a question in there if you want to ask me a question right now, and they will send you one of these signed book plates.
Which you will put in your book, and you will know that you bought the book on the first day of the presale, and that's pretty freakin' great.
All right, here we go.
Ten more.
Jay, Charles, Travis, Justin, Dwee, Samuel, Angela, Pierre, Joe, Kurt, and I'll throw in an 11th, Elliot.
For now, guys, you can delete those, and I'll get back to some of these questions.
What's your advice for someone who wants to make YouTube videos, but is worried about what others will think or say?
I used to make YouTube videos back in high school, but got bullied into stopping, but years later, not a day goes by where I don't think about making them.
How do I have the courage not to care what others think and pursue it?
Do it.
Do it.
There's nothing I can tell you other than to do it.
I get this question, especially at the college things, because everyone wants to be a YouTuber, which is probably the symptom of something going wrong in society at some level.
I say that with all due irony.
But do it.
What would the advice be?
What could be the other advice?
Don't do what you want to do.
Give up your dreams.
Don't say what you really think.
I mean, anyone that gives you any other advice when you say, you know, I want to take a chance.
I want to take a chance.
I'll give you a great example of this.
I've mentioned this a couple of times here.
When Sargon of Akkad got booted off Patreon, Jordan and I started discussing what to do.
Our personal circumstances and finances are very different.
He was in the middle of crushing it on the bookstore and sold millions and millions of copies of the book.
Doing super well from the tour, and I'm obviously doing fine and all that, or I'm doing better than fine, but as I told you before, about 70% of our monthly rev was coming off Patreon.
And a normal person in business, I'm not just funding myself here, we have several employees, our team is growing, we have full-timers, we have part-timers, all of this stuff.
We've got capital and overhead and all this stuff, right?
And I wanted to take a stand.
And I thought, if I cancel Patreon and try to do this on my own, like, I don't know what's gonna happen.
What if I lose, what if I lose that 70%?
What if no one wants to come over?
Not even because people don't like me, what if people are just lazy?
Like, they're just like, oh, Patreon got canceled, like, I guess I could go over there, but like, I'm busy, everyone, you know, this thing on Netflix, like, that's it, right?
And you just forget about it.
And my feeling was I have to do what I think is right, but I did call some people.
I called, so I don't wanna out anybody, but I'm gonna out one guy here.
I won't out some of the other people, but I called several people, some of them who've been on this show.
Some influential people who are in the business who get it.
And I asked several people what they thought I should do.
And it's pretty rare that I would call several people asking for advice on the same thing.
But I really didn't know what to do.
I knew I wanted to leave Patreon.
I wasn't sure we could fund this properly.
Finally, I felt like my life is sort of being stable.
I used to have debt.
I don't have debt anymore.
All of these things.
And I called a couple people, and a couple people, who I'm not gonna mention, might surprise you in that they actually did tell me, you know, just suck it up for now, this isn't the hill to die on, just let it be, it'll blow over, you know, whatever.
And then I called Glenn Beck, okay?
And I called Glenn Beck, and he said, Like, without hesitation.
Like, I was like, Glenn, I'm thinking about canceling the Patreon account.
And he's like, yes, do it.
He's like, you gotta take risks in life.
Go ahead and do it and do it and do it.
And he just, he had such passion the way he was saying it.
And look, here's a guy who's taken big risks in life.
He bounced around on some cable channels.
He was hated for a long time.
He's had mea culpas about that.
I think he's a really great guy.
I think he's basically a libertarian who wants to live and let live.
I think that, you know, he's apologized for some of the mistakes he's made in the past, but he's taken big risks, right, across the board.
And the way he said it, when I hung up the phone, I was like, how could I not take that advice?
How could I not take that advice?
The guy who was telling me, do what I believe in, take a chance, take a risk.
What does everyone do in a movie?
What do all the heroes do in movies?
Does the hero get challenged?
Maybe tomorrow.
Can't someone else do it?
So I think you just have to get in.
So if you want to be a YouTuber, Even if you wanna be a YouTuber who makes videos about how bad Dave Rubin is, how mean Dave Rubin is all day long, get out there and do it.
And what I also tell people is, especially on the YouTube front, well now the algorithm is so out of whack and you guys know I've had some meetings at YouTube and stuff like that, and I'll talk more about that in September, it's just not the right time right now.
But what I would say is don't worry about the numbers.
Put out something that you think is good.
Put out something that you think is decent.
And by the way, if you think that you're gonna put out something that's good and decent, And you're not going to get a job for it, or someone's going to attack you for it, or the mob's going to come get you.
As I said before, do you think that by not doing what you think that you stop the mob, you actually fuel the mob?
The only way you stop the mob, the only way you stop this collectivist monster that is encroaching on all of us, is to take a stand.
Take a stand and see what happens.
And I guarantee you, they can't kill all of us, right?
They can do some horrible things, they really can.
They can go for some people's jobs, they can make people's lives miserable.
I've had my phone number released and email released, and all sorts of terrible things happened in the last year related to that sort of stuff that I would generally prefer not to talk about.
But it's a drop in the bucket compared to what I think the good thing is, which is all of this, and it's why I wrote this book, and it's why I hope when people take this book that they'll get a little something, so that they'll come up to me on the street and go, Dave, you know...
I read this part in the middle, and you were talking about your belief on abortion through a classical liberal lens, and I actually take the conservative approach on that.
But I heard what you said, and I respect your opinion, and I'm going to agree to disagree.
I will gladly take that.
I will gladly take that, and that's the society that I want to live in.
What kind of society do you want to live in?
So go to Don'tBurnThisBook.com.
Buy the book, you can get it at Barnes & Noble, you can get it at Amazon, Apple Books, wherever it is.
Get the receipt, forward it over to DontBurnThisBook at prhpenguinrandomhouse.com, prh.com, and they will have, then, your email address, and then they're gonna get your regular address, and you are gonna get a signed book plate, because I am signing every single book that is sold on day one of the presale.
By the way, I realize that in a little bit, I suppose, there is a democratic debate, but I promise you, you won't learn anything there.
If anything, you will be dumber by watching that.
I hope here maybe you've learned a little something or you've at least thought about a little something.
So, oh, okay, so let me just, I'll just roll to the questions.
Let's see here.
Do you have a favorite joke orbit?
A joke orbit?
I don't know what that means.
Do I have a favorite joke orbit?
Like, type of joke?
Well, I'll tell you just a couple of the things that influenced me the most comedically over the years.
I remember, it's so ironic now because he is the world's most famous serial rapist, but in about 1983, I was seven years old.
I write about this in the book, actually.
I saw Bill Cosby himself.
I remember it was on HBO.
I mean, I completely remember this.
I remember seeing the HBO intro thing flying in.
And I remember being in my parents' living room Sitting too close to the TV.
My mom was always telling me to sit away from the TV.
But I'm sitting basically with my feet, like, on the thing, the TV stand.
And I'm just looking up, like, two feet up, Bill Cosby.
I'm sure many of you, if not all of you, have seen this special.
It's called Bill Cosby Himself.
He's in a brown suit.
He's sitting on a stool.
It's comedy perfection, basically.
Let's just put aside everything else about Cosby for a sec.
And I remember seeing that as a seven-year-old and I didn't really understand what he was saying you know he's doing the thing about the dentist and he's doing the thing about chocolate cake and you know what it's like when you have a hangover after work and all this stuff after partying and going back to work and I remember laughing like that that deep pain in the stomach when you are just Uncontrollably laughing and you can't stop and I remember thinking like who wouldn't want to make people laugh and then from then on from about Six years old so like first grade.
I just wanted to make people laugh and that's what's sort of funny about Doing stand-up again, because I know on this show, when I'm an interviewer, I'm not that funny.
There are funny moments.
But I really treat this as an interview show, and I want to be respectful of my guests.
And yeah, there are moments where there's some play and fun or whatever.
But that's also the nice part of when people come see me do stand-up, because then I meet people after, and they're like, man, I didn't know you were funny.
And that's actually very refreshing to me.
It's like a different part of me.
We all have different parts of ourselves.
When I'm in this studio doing an interview, I'm an interviewer.
That's a part of me.
When I'm doing stand-up, I'm a stand-up.
But the other nice thing about stand-up now is I don't really want to be a stand-up.
I don't want that life.
I guess if Netflix wanted to give me a special or something, I'd work enough to do it.
We've been thinking about doing something where I go on tour for a couple months and just basically never tell the same joke twice and just mess with the crowd and then we loop that all in together to some special.
We've been talking about that.
But I don't really want it, and it's nice that when you don't want something, it becomes even more enjoyable to you.
So Bill Cosby himself was one of the major things that affected me.
George Carlin, of course, of course, of course.
I've got Kelly Carlin, a Carlin Home companion, George Carlin's daughter, her book right there.
George Carlin was a huge, huge influence on me.
It would be really interesting to wonder what George Carlin would be thinking right now.
Because at some level, he'd be the old white man that they'd be booing off college campuses.
And on the other hand, he was a real lefty.
He always wanted to fight the power when lefty ideas were about fighting the power.
But he was a brilliant linguist in the way he used language and timing and incredible, so most of those George Carlin specials.
The last one, which I think is called It's Bad for Ya, if I'm not mistaken, it's like his summation of everything he thinks in the world.
It's just absolutely wonderful.
Kelly told me years later that he basically knew he was going to die when that special came out, and you can see him sort of putting a cap on everything.
It's just incredible.
Ellen DeGeneres, the one that's called In the Beginning, which is her first special after coming out, is spectacular, honest stand-up.
It's just, just great.
Seinfeld was a huge influence, Larry David.
The Simpsons in the formative years, those, you know, 1989 when I was, you know, 13, to season eight, like, around 97.
I mean, those years of The Simpsons, oh, The Simpsons, there's just absolutely nothing better.
Okay, here we go!
New orders, I'll do 20.
How about 20?
Jay, Charles, Travis, Justin, Dwee, Samuel, Angela, Pierre, Joe, Kurt, Elliot, Barbara, Steve, Nathan, Josh, Michael, Erica, Tangent, I'll just keep going because I think maybe I read some of these.
Dan, Eric, Tony, Alexander, Sean, Philip, Jen, Alexander, Scott, Wesson, Casey for Devin, Dana, Guy, Leonardo, Justin, Drew, Diane, Julie, Kevin, Michelle, Martin, Jared, Caleb, Mark, Alex, Brandon, Brandon, two Brandons in a row, Mike, Chris, Warren, and William.
All right.
We did it there.
Okay, let's see.
A couple other questions here.
When can we expect yours and Peterson's alternative?
So this has been coming up a lot.
So I didn't want to say too much about what I'm sort of doing solo at the moment, and I don't want to say too much about what's going on with ThinkSpot because Jordan hasn't been too public about it yet.
There's a lot of things.
What I can promise you is this.
There's a lot of things happening.
If there's anyone on this earth that can fix the problems with the tech companies, it's
Jordan Peterson.
I just firmly believe that.
I think he's doing the best he can to figure it out.
He's got some personal stuff going on that I think some of you guys know about, but I
don't want to really get into it.
It's not really my place to talk about it.
So I think that that maybe has delayed things a little bit.
But trust me, if anyone can solve any of this stuff, it's a team that's led by Jordan.
So that's what I would say about that.
All right, I don't know what time it is.
I've been going for quite some time.
I don't think this is the real time here.
Oh, I guess maybe it is.
Don'tburnthisbook.com, people.
Buy my book, which is up for pre-sale today.
The sales numbers seem to be pretty damn good according to what's going on over here.
If you buy the book today, I am signing every single copy.
I am signing book plates for everybody, whether you buy the digital copy or the hardcover copy.
They will mail them to you, the good people at Penguin Random House,
and then you can put it in your book or you can put it on the back of your e-reader
or whatever you got there, and you will know that you bought the book on the first day.
And I really think this is gonna be one of the big books of 2020.
I've given this thing all I got, which is setting me up to go off the grid in just a little bit, which I will be doing soon enough.
We're gonna tie up a whole bunch of loose ends tomorrow.
Man, I have a crazy, crazy day tomorrow.
Try to imagine getting everything leading to the book launch, and now I have to do one more day of stuff.
And figure out a whole bunch of things leading up to to September off the grid.
But I do hope that that some of you guys will join me, as I said, whether it's just for the weekends where you put your phone down or you just try to pay a little less attention to news.
Now, I know I've seen when I've tweeted about this, I've seen some people say, well, then you're just ceding ground to the crazies.
And it's like, actually, if we're at a point where you can't take a little time to recharge the
batteries, if you can't step out of the madness a little bit,
then we've probably lost already.
So I would rather take the risk of whatever that means to you in your life.
I understand that not everyone's gonna have the luxury to lock their phone in a safe, which is what I'm going to
unidentified
do.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Lock my phone in a safe.
Maybe we'll do a video of that.
Then maybe that'll be the last thing that I post.
And, oh, and by the way, if you're trying to reach out to me
for anything business-related, if you want me to come speak at your college
or anything like that, any gigs that you want, if there's business opportunities,
if you've heard what I've talked about, about the tech stuff.
Or any of that kind of stuff.
You can, at DaveRubin.com, you can just go to DaveRubin.com slash contact and my team will still be working.
They'll forward emails to the appropriate people and we'll see what we can do.
But I will be MIA and we'll see how the brain functioning and I you know we know that these things they're
trying to addict us to these screens we know that they trying to keep us
clicking right and I think there's a there's a little bit of a way we can all
fight it in our own way so yeah we'll see okay okay I'll do a couple new orders
Barry, Kathleen, Jonathan, Nick, Will, Elena, Howard, Ryan, Dexter, Sarah, Luke, Mary, Matt, Kevin, Jason, Taylor, Salvador, Daniel, Megan, Elizabeth, David, Marshall, and Jacob!
Thank you very much.
If you guys go to DontBurnThisBook.com, you can buy the book at either Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
or IndieBound and then forward the receipt to DontBurnThisBook at prh.com,
that's PenguinRandomHouse.com, and then you can include a little question in there.
And you know what I'm gonna do?
I'm gonna go for, it is now 5.03 Pacific time.
I'm gonna go to 5.15.
I'll do 12 more minutes here live.
And then I'm gonna, I don't know what I'm gonna do I think I'm barbecuing tonight for my sister and my brother-in-law and the kids.
I'll do the barbecuing tonight, so we'll do that.
Okay, a couple other shout-outs.
Kyle, Jeff, Andrea, Zachary, Michael, Sarah, Pete!
I'll hold the rest for there.
So what else can I, you know, I wrote down a few things that I wanted to talk about, about the book, specifically.
We'll talk about this one a little bit.
So one of the things I talk about is how to fight the mob, right?
That's been a little bit of a theme of what we've talked about here tonight.
And, you know, one of the things about this is that when you take a position that is not bigoted or racist or anything like that, that is not really controversial in any way, that's just What you happen to think that maybe is a little more liberty minded or something like that.
It's always shocking.
I think this is what happens.
This is the first moment.
That's the thing.
I lay out the steps of sort of grief of what will happen.
Once you start saying what you think, we know what's going to happen because this has happened over and over and over again.
But it's always shocking to people.
The way people turn on them, the venom that people turn on them with, that people that know them suddenly will say horrible things to them.
I give some examples that have happened to me about that very direct thing, that very exact thing, I should say.
And you suddenly, you're getting hate in places you never thought you'd get hate.
And then suddenly you're looking at the other side and the other side is kind of going, We're here.
We're okay.
Maybe we're not that bad.
Maybe we're kind of like you were.
And we're here.
And you start sort of seeing the rejiggering of the configuration.
And that again is what is leading me to be so enthusiastic about everything right now.
But what I can tell you is that when you start getting the hate, it's sort of unimaginable at a certain level.
And I tell a very personal story in the book that I'll just tell you a little bit about right now.
I've mentioned this, I mentioned this on the Joe Rogan podcast
last time I was on, just briefly, and I've mentioned it in live streams
a little bit here and there, but when the show was really taking off,
so as I mentioned, we kicked off the show with Sam Harris as an interview show on ORTV, September 9th, 2015.
And then shortly after that, I had Maajid Nawaz on, I had Douglas Murray on, I had Ayaan Hirsi Ali on, a few other people.
And all of us were lefties.
We were all liberals and we were talking about our frustrations with the left.
This is pre-Trump and all that.
And we were all just talking about our frustrations with our side.
And suddenly I started getting this endless hate, and I couldn't believe it.
No conservatives were angry at me, no Republicans were angry at me, nobody on the right was angry at me, but suddenly my own side was saying all these awful things about me, which was exactly what I had sort of been predicting and talking about with all of these people.
But then it started coming from personal people, from public people that I knew, people that, I mean, literally at least one person that was invited to my wedding, I mean, crazy, crazy stuff.
And one day I was getting a haircut, And my girl Jess, who's one of my best friends, she's my stylist, and she had David come over, and she said, she said, man, I wanna look at this.
And I was missing a big patch of hair in the back of my head.
And then she started looking around, and I was missing several big patches in the back of my head.
Anyway, long story short, after going to some doctors, it turns out that I had, I was diagnosed with alopecia areata, which is basically an autoimmune disease where your white blood cells start attacking your hair follicles.
They don't know why, so they chalk it up to stress.
Now I was under a tremendous amount of stress.
Suddenly I was getting hate, like endless, relentless hate from the good guys,
the liberals, the progressives, the tolerant, decent people.
I was getting a tremendous amount of hate from them, from my side.
And I probably wasn't dealing with it the best way possible.
And I probably wasn't dealing with it the best way possible.
You know, I'm kind of expressive here when I do these things with you,
You know, I'm kind of expressive here when I do these things with you,
but generally in life, I'm like a little more calm and cool and collected,
but generally in life I'm like a little more calm and cool and collected and I don't share
and I don't share every thought that I have all the time.
every thought that I have all the time.
And I'm not the most overly emotional person, let's say, which I think does lead to good...
And I'm not the most overly emotional person, let's say, which I think does lead to good,
to a good ability to interview somebody in a calm manner.
But anyway, I started losing huge chunks of hair and then it started moving to the top of my head.
And then we tried steroid injections, cortisones, a whole bunch of stuff and nothing was working.
And then I ended up going on a really experimental treatment
which I talk about in the book that basically causes, in effect, it's like putting poison ivy on your head.
And the hope is that the white blood cells that are attacking your hair follicles,
instead of attacking the follicles, will attack the reaction and then your hair will grow back.
Anyway, I had absolutely horrific reaction to it because you're basically putting stuff you're allergic to
on your body and at the height now, so now the show's blowing up, right?
Like I'm on the way up, like I'm at the beginning of my success and I'm being recognized
and I'm being invited places and all this stuff.
And things are really working, we're making a little money, things are chugging along.
And suddenly I'm dealing with this horrific affliction that actually at one point I had lost so much hair
on top of my head that like I had this like strip like right here basically, the front strip
and I was doing all sorts of crazy shit and I was putting like black powder to cover up spots
and then I was also one of the side effects that I was insanely hot all the time.
So, you know, we're in hot studio lights and I'd be dripping and sweating and I was really bloated.
And like, I look back on videos, you can look at some of the videos that we did
in the fall of 2015 and in early 2016.
And I look like a mess.
I do not look like myself.
I look exhausted and big bags under my eyes.
And it was not good.
It was terrible, actually.
And I really thought about quitting at one point.
And then I tell the story about I was really thinking about it.
I was like, I don't know that I can do this.
Maybe we'll just do a radio show.
Maybe I won't do anything anymore.
And again, this is just as I'm on the way up.
Long story short, over the last couple of years, I've completely changed my diet, changed my workout thing.
I mostly do paleo.
I do something called PRP, which is platelet-rich plasma, which they take your blood out of yourself, they spin it in a centrifuge and inject it back into you, and I do that like once every two months or so, and I do have one or two tiny little spots, but this is all my hair, it's all real, but I do have one or two tiny little spots, and anyway, I mention all of this just to tell you that When you fight the mob, weird things happen.
I've talked to some other people that have fought the mob, some public people, and they've told me some shit that they've had to deal with or what it's done to their own personal relationships or this and that.
But I would say there is nothing... To not be yourself, to not fight for what you believe in, is a far worse...
It's a far worse sentence than losing a little hair or something like that.
So I hope that you guys will join me on the adventure.
And how you can join me on the adventure?
Purchase.
Don't burn this book.
Free thinking.
We change it.
So it was going to be free thinking in an age of unreason, but thinking for yourself in an age of unreason.
The forwards by Jordan Peterson, which I still am over the moon about.
If you buy this book up until midnight tonight, I am going to sign book plates for as many people as buy books today.
I've been doing shout outs this entire time.
Obviously, I can't do shout outs for everybody.
That would be completely bananas.
So yeah, I think that's it.
Okay, so I'll answer one more question here.
I'm just gonna do, you know what, I'll do five more minutes.
So if you're gonna order the book, anyone that orders the book in the next, from now, you know what, I'll go till 5.20 my time.
So it'll be 8.20 Eastern, so nine more minutes.
So anyone that orders the book in those last nine minutes, I'll give you a shout out.
Here's just a couple more.
Ifat, Phillip, Gordon, Liz, Brian, Andrew, Jeff, Matthew, Chad, Larry, Kirill, Devin, Derek, Hayden, Matthew, and four rescue dogs, Bailey, Landry, Molly, and Daisy, Quinton, Joe, John, Sarah, and Cheryl.
Four rescue dogs.
Did you buy four books for the four dogs?
You got four shout-outs there?
I want to know more about that.
Email our people at DontBurnThisBook at PRH.com.
I want to know more about these dogs.
Okay, I'll answer one more question, as I said, so we'll go eight more minutes.
Anyone else that buys the book while we're doing this?
I'm signing book plates, people.
I'm sorry that I can't personalize these, but try to imagine the logistical nightmare that that would be.
But yes, there will be a book tour.
The book drops on April 28th of 2020.
I'm sure we'll be on tour all of May, all of June.
We've already had some interest in an Australian tour.
I've had a couple people reach out to me in London about trying to put that together.
So we're gonna bounce all over the place.
And oh, and as I mentioned before, The international rights are not sold yet.
So my agents are dealing with that right now.
So I know a lot of you guys, because obviously this is YouTube and audio podcasts, where you guys are all over the world.
And I met you guys all over the world.
And I get email, the amount of email that I get from India.
What's going on in India lately?
I get a ton of email from India and I hope to get to India.
That would be awesome.
I really want to get to Japan.
That's the other place that I, the two places that I haven't been that I really want to get to are Japan and India.
And I really also want to go to New Zealand.
The tour with Jordan did go to New Zealand, but I had a family engagement that I had to leave, so I left Australia and I came back home, which actually was pretty cool because the last show that I did was the only matinee show we did of the entire tour.
Um, was at the Sydney Opera House, which of course most of you know, it's the iconic theatre in Sydney, right on the water, on the boardwalk there.
And it was the only matinee show we did.
It was a beautiful, beautiful day in Sydney.
The Australians, I loved, loved, loved, loved, loved, loved the Australians.
Like, just such fun, good, decent people.
Everybody looks good because it's sunny all the time.
The Australian accents are great.
I hung out with some kangaroos.
It was just, I just loved every bit of it.
Um, but that day, Everything was sort of backwards because it was a matinee and there were other shows coming in.
First off, the theater itself was incredible.
It was the only show that we did that was a true theater in the round.
So a theater in the round, obviously, the performer's in the middle and there's audience all around you.
So they have it sort of, it's not round, actually, it's a theater in a box.
So you have people in front of you, both sides, you behind you.
So you're completely surrounded by people.
And one of the coolest feelings that I had the entire tour, and as a performer, probably the coolest thing that I've ever experienced, was getting laughs When they're coming from every direction, I could feel the laughs coming from behind me.
And they were like hitting me in every direction and it was the last show that we did.
But what was really cool about that actually was that Jordan...
You guys know Jordan's on his carnivore diet, so he's only eating steak basically.
And at the venue there, the steak was pre-made with something and he just wants it straight up steak, no nothing.
So even though he had this huge show to put on, and you know, it's this iconic theater and all that, we walk out The security guard takes us out.
We walk down the boardwalk with his wife, Tammy, who's wonderful.
And we walk down the boardwalk, and people are saying hi to us the whole time, and it's hot out, and we're wearing suits.
And we go into it.
We find a steak joint.
We sit in there.
Basically, everyone in the restaurant, pretty much, was a fan of Jordan's, knew who we were.
And, you know, they all wanted to say hi.
And the security guard said, you know, you should just eat and not say hi to people and whatever.
And Jordan made sure to shake everybody's hand that wanted to be shaked, took a picture with everybody that wanted the picture to be taken.
And then we had to run back And then as we're running back, literally, people are high-fiving us, like, as we're running back to the theater.
It was just a great day.
Okay, so, a couple new orders.
Ari, Nancy, Sarah, Justin, Eric, John, Brian, and Ben, thank you.
So anyway, as for any big plans for the last half of the year, we've got five more minutes, guys.
Yeah, we got big plans.
So I go off the grid.
We come back on September 3rd.
There will be a guest host, which I think we just finalized today, which I'm really excited about.
Ben Shapiro did it last year.
We're going with somebody else this year.
Somebody you all know, and it's going to be really cool.
My hope, oh, I will be making one sort of career show announcement that day, too, which I just can't say more about right this second due to, you know, ink drying on things.
But let's just say, you know, there's a lot of other ways to get things out there than YouTube.
And then my hope also is that this tech company that I told you I started, we've made some really, really great headway with what we're building, and I hope that we'll be able to launch a beta that day.
So people that we can get in on that, let's say the master betas, we're going to choose people that are currently subscribers at DaveRubin.com, so they'll have advanced warning on that.
Yeah, then I want to start doing stand-up again.
As I said, as 2020 rolls around, we'll get more into touring for the book and the rest of it.
But you know, one of the things that Jordan said to me all throughout the tour was, you know, if we're doing this, he would always say, he said we, I don't think he meant me really, but he would say, you know, if we're doing this, Let's give it everything we've got.
Why wouldn't we?
And that's really how I feel about life and sort of what I'm doing at the moment.
Let's just give it everything we've got and see what we can do.
I don't know, maybe if I've helped, I guess, inspire a couple people to stand up for what they believe in, and that's what I'm trying to impart on you guys with this book, well then maybe you do it, and then maybe someone else does it, and then who knows what that ripple does.
We don't know.
Why not try it, right?
It would be pretty awesome.
Garrett, Steven, Paul, and John, you guys are getting signed book plates.
All right, here's my last pitch, guys.
So right now, it's five o'clock Pacific.
We're doing this till midnight Pacific.
I can't talk the entire time till midnight Pacific.
But if you go to DontBurnThisBook.com, you can buy Don't Burn This Book, There we go, I think that'll get rid of the glare.
You can buy Don't Burn This Book, and if you forward your receipt to don'tburnthisbook
at prh.com, penguinrandomhouse.com, they will send, they will come back to you, they'll
get your address, you will get a signed book plate, which you can then put in your book
nice and neat, or you can put on the back of your book, or you can put wherever you
like to put it, and you will forever know that you bought this book on day one.
And I humbly thank you, I cannot believe how many of these I will be signing.
This is actually completely, I barely made a dent here.
This is ridiculous.
Aaron, if you want to show the table here, I know I was supposed to be signing way more of these for now.
I'm going to have to do this basically all day tomorrow while I'm trying to get off the grid.
Lewis, Heather, Kurt, and Timothy, thank you guys.
We've got two minutes left, guys.
Let's see.
Here's an interesting question real quick.
I wish I had more time.
Do you recommend gay conservatives utilizing their sexuality if running for office?
Well, I would say, you know, it's something like the way I do this.
It's like if people watch the show for a year and then someone will email me or meet me on the street and go, you know, I watched the show for a year.
I didn't know you were gay.
And then I found out and it's like, I don't care.
All right, I hope you're happy.
Big whoop.
You know, that's how it should be.
Nobody should use your sexuality as a crudule and no one should be treated worse than because of their sexuality.
I think that there's absolutely an awakening within the gay community, if that's a thing, within gay people, let's say, that they don't have to be Democrats.
And I think this is loosely connected with Candace Owens and what she's done in the black community, which is basically, all she's done is basically say black people don't have to be Democrats.
Offensive or even remotely controversial opinion.
Of course your color of your skin or your sexuality should have nothing to do with how you vote in a proper system where everyone's treated equally.
So I find it really interesting what's happened sort of with the gays where gay people used to be kind of edgy and on the fringes of society and were really forward on art and culture and music and all and ideas.
Right?
And now the gay community, through GLAAD and all of these progressive things, have become the harpiest, sort of preachiest, unpleasant, blah, nothings that they want to be.
But I know many gay people that are not like that.
And I live in L.A.
here.
I meet a lot of gay people.
And a lot of times they'll say to me, So that is one of the things I talk about in, or in this book, by the way.
I actually sort of relate the being closeted about your sexuality, and I talk about some of my experiences in that, to being closeted politically, and no one should live like that.
All right, guys, it is 5.20, so it is time.
Let me get these last few people.
Oh, I got more info on those four rescues.
Bailey is a Jack Russell mix.
Landry's a small mix.
Molly is a pit mix who was thrown out of a truck and into a creek, and you found her.
Wow, amazing.
And Daisy's a shepherd.
I'm still confused.
Did you buy four books for these dogs?
What happened here?
This is, well, who knows?
It's okay.
Okay, and the last few orders that I'm seeing right now, and then I just gotta get to all the orders.
Also, the other thing was that there were orders coming in all day.
I was just trying to read what I could get to here.
Aaron, Andrew, Cody, Erica, and Sam.
Guys, it's been a crazy year as I head off the grid.
Tomorrow I'll probably send out a little Twitter thread, or maybe I'll just do a little five minute recap video about going off the grid and all that.
But I just wanna say, everything that I've been trying to do here, it's working and it's coming together because of you guys, and I hope that in the time when everyone wants to burn everything down, right?
That's why we titled it like this.
In a time when everyone wants to burn everything down, I hope you'll, Try to be one of the people that doesn't.
And I know the forces that be and the powers that be and maybe human nature kind of push us all into that.
And social media makes us all want to do that.
We want to own each other and crush the libtards and destroy people and the cuckservatives and all that nonsense.
But I think we have a lot more to lose than to gain by doing that.
And I think we can reset some of this stuff.
That's why I wrote this book.
And I think the forces that want to keep splitting us, I don't think it's some grand conspiracy forces.
What I mean by that is just human nature and the way we all behave and the way the political machines operate and all those things, they all want to kind of divide us.
And I think if you step away from some of the madness a little bit, if you really learn to think for yourself in a time
when people aren't thinking that clearly.
And you know why you think things and all those things, that I think incredible things can happen.
I just fundamentally believe that.
Brittany and David, you're getting the last two shout outs.
No, wait a minute, I see Beverly being typed right now.
So thank you guys.
I'm humbled and honored and elated and all that good stuff by everything that you've afforded me to be able to do.
So I head off the grid on Thursday.
I'll be back on September 3rd.
As I said, big, big career announcement that day.
Guest host that day.
We'll talk about the tech stuff that day as well.
A lot's happening.
And okay, I think that is it.
All right.
I feel good about this.
Thank you, guys.
We're crushing it, I guess, on Amazon, and we'll find out what's going on at Barnes & Noble's and the rest of it.
So thank you, thank you, thank you.
Don'tBurnThisBook.com.
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